Kathryn Bradley is a senior lecturing fellow at Duke University law school, where she teaches family law and legal ethics. She is an adoptive parent. Excerpts from an interview with Q editor Jane Ruffin:

Q: Is it difficult for unmarried fathers to contest adoptions?

A: I think it's overly difficult.

Q: Why do you say that?

A: With newborns, the thought is you want to have the adoption as quickly as possible, as easily as possible, so the child's in a permanent home as quickly as possible. The problem is that a lot of unwed fathers don't know that they're fathers until the child is born or they don't know perhaps until well into the pregnancy, and they really haven't had the opportunity to come to terms with what that responsibility might mean or to figure out whether they want to assert their rights as parents.

Q: Is it really in a child's interest to have an unwed father pop up and be uncertain about what he wants to do or wait to the last minute, after the child is born, to try to assert his rights?

A: Whether it's at the last minute depends on what the father knows about the pregnancy, whether the mother has kept in contact with the father and so forth. The mother has control over the pregnancy until the child is born, and I think that's exactly the way the law should be. I firmly believe in a woman's right to choose.

But once the child is there, the child has two biological parents. And the fact is that, I think, most unwed fathers will say, "I don't object to an adoption. I'm happy to have the child placed in a home with loving parents, and I'm glad to not have the responsibility for this child going forward." But if there are fathers out there who say, "Wait a minute. I had no idea that I was a dad, and I want to have a chance to develop a relationship, and I'm willing to assume that responsibility," I think the father is every bit as entitled to have that opportunity as the mother is.

And the mechanisms in place right now are skewed in favor of processing newborn adoptions quickly, which is good in most instances. But where there's a father who comes forward at the point of birth or after that and says, "Wait a minute, I really want to have a chance to build this relationship," I think there needs to be a mechanism to allow him to do so.

Q: Right now he has to at least pay support or set up an account. But how would a father go about doing it under your idea?

A: He'd have to be able to pay support, but I think he's got to have some information about "Here is how you can go about doing that." Putative father registries and the idea of setting up a trust fund or a bank account, they should not be big secrets. We shouldn't be looking at fathers and saying, "Uh, you didn't know what you were supposed to do. Too bad. You lose."

I think there should be some assistance to say, "OK, you've been identified as the father. If you want to maintain your parental rights, here's what you need to do. You either need to now register as the father or you need to pay support, and here's how you can do that even if the mother's not going to be fully cooperative" and so forth, so there's some level of assistance to make sure the father knows what his rights are. ...

I think the father should have at least a reasonable period of time -- I don't know whether it's 30 days or 60 days -- to say "OK, here's what I want to do."

Q: Wouldn't that postpone adoptions that might go through anyway? It seems like it would be inviting fathers to gum up the works.

A: It's not necessarily in the father's interest to gum up the works, because if he's legally the father, then he's going to have a support obligation until that child reaches the age of maturity.

One of the mechanisms I think you could work into this is to explain in whatever goes to the father to say, "Here are the things you can do if you want to assert your rights. If you want to assert your rights as a father, you have certain responsibilities. You're going to be obligated to support this child until the child reaches the age of majority," and so forth.

I think many fathers will, on balance, say, "OK, this is in the best interest of the child. I'm not in a position to raise the child, and I don't object." But for those fathers that legitimately do want to raise their child and want to be in the child's life, I think they need to have a little bit of breathing space to be able to do so.